


Epilogue D

by toushindai (WallofIllusion)



Category: Baccano!
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2015-04-25
Packaged: 2018-03-25 16:58:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3817999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WallofIllusion/pseuds/toushindai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One final letter from Jean-Pierre Accardo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Epilogue D

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has an extremely high concentration of Fermet and also goes into some detail regarding Jean-Pierre Accardo's desire and very near attempt to kill himself. Please read with caution. Ah, there's a reference to torture, too. _Please read with caution._

> To an unseen reader:
> 
> This letter should not exist.
> 
> I should have ended my own life, as I wrote in my previous letter. It may be that you only found the letter with the false ending and don’t know the full extent of my sins; if that is the case, I beg of you, never search for it. Take my word that they are vast and unforgivable, and that death by my own hand would have been too kind for me.
> 
> I knew that, and like the coward I am, I sought such an end anyway.
> 
> And like a coward, I couldn’t even achieve that.
> 
> I will no longer entreat you to read to the end of my letter. If you have found this, I have already doomed more than myself. I pray to any god that might still have mercy on me that it will never be found.
> 
> But I must write it.
> 
>  
> 
> After I finished and concealed my previous letters, I tried to end my life.
> 
> I saw my wife off to the market with an embrace—an ordinary embrace, such that she would suspect nothing. I put our son to bed in his cradle and stayed with him until he stopped fussing and slept. Then I went into our kitchen, readied my pistol, and aligned the barrel with my temple.
> 
> How long did I sit like that?
> 
> How long did I sit with my hand trembling, my breath heaving, my thoughts whirling in circles?
> 
> Do not pity me.
> 
> I did not stay my hand out of concern for my wife, who would have found me there when she came home. I did not spare a thought for my son, who would have been wakened by the sound of the gunshot that took his father’s life. My only thoughts of them were selfish ones:
> 
> I wanted to be part of a family.
> 
> I wanted to live happily with them.
> 
> My greatest cowardice, and my greatest folly, is that I wanted to live more than I wanted to die.
> 
> It felt like I sat there for hours with the pistol pressed to my head, but by the time my wife returned, I had resigned myself to my weakness. She found me sobbing with my head buried in my arms, the pistol set aside. My kind wife asked nothing, sought no explanation; she only wrapped her arms around me and held me. If I had had the time, I may have found it in me to tell her everything. The words may have come flooding out all at once, a coward’s confession. She may have come to understand the full extent of what I’ve done, and why she has had to call me by a false name all these long years.
> 
> But I was not granted that time.
> 
> Before I had a chance to dry my eyes, there came a pounding knock on the door, and soldiers forced their way into my home. To be honest, when I first saw the red and gold of their uniforms and the hourglass seal on their chests, I did not comprehend what was about to happen to me. I was wary—but only wary.
> 
> Not until they spoke my name did my blood run cold.
> 
> “Jean-Pierre Accardo.”
> 
> It had been almost a decade since anyone called me by that name.
> 
> Even _he_ , when he visited a few days ago, called me by the false name I’ve been using. The way his lips curled into a smile around it was the first sign to me that his visit would not be a kind one.
> 
> But now, the Dormentaire soldiers spoke it with cold voices, and I knew they had come to make me pay for my sins.
> 
> A cleverer man than I may have tried to deceive them.
> 
> A braver man than I may have greeted his fate with poise and turned himself over to their arrest.
> 
> I—
> 
> I panicked.
> 
> With a terrified cry, I reached once more for the pistol, certain that this time, _this time_ I would be able to put an end to my own life. If I could not end it out of guilt, at least I could end it out of fear. And I believe that, had I been able to reach the gun, this time I would have accomplished my goal.
> 
> But my wife—my gentle, sensible wife—had moved it out of my reach. And when she saw me reach for it, she caught my arm and held it fast.
> 
> “Jean,” she said, looking into my eyes.
> 
> She called me by my real name.
> 
> She said it in a voice full of love—a voice that promised faithfulness, and forgiveness. With a single word, she forgave me for my lies, my secrets, my unknown sins. She forgave me, and because of that, I quailed once more.
> 
> I would have collapsed back into my seat under the burden of her forgiveness. But before I could, the soldiers surrounded me, pushing my wife aside to arrest me.
> 
> I have not seen her since that day.
> 
>  
> 
> I cannot detail what happened next.
> 
> I recognize the irony. I have written these words before, my hands trembling at my own terrible imagination of Huey Laforet’s justified rage. It was a lie then, but I swear to God that I am telling the truth now: I cannot bear to remember what they have done to me. I was arrested. I was beaten. Let that suffice.
> 
> But there is one more occurrence I must record. If my record is to serve its purpose—if it is to be the confession and warning that it seeks to be—I must describe my final meeting with the man known as Lebreau Fermet Viralesque.

 

“Jean?”

The sound of his name draws the disgraced playwright back into consciousness. He shifts, and the wounds on his back ache. One breaks open again and he hunches over in pain, his breath labored.

But then he realizes what sound woke him, and a chill goes up his spine. Slowly, he raises his head and gets to his feet.

Standing just outside his cell is Lebreau Fermet Viralesque.

_It’s a dream. It’s a nightmare. It has to be._

His attempts to convince himself fail. The pain and the stench of his own blood and the heartbeats wracking his body are all too real for that. Lebreau is here, staring between the bars of his cell, wearing a perfect smile. He’s waiting for Jean to speak.

And so, the only thing Jean can do is speak.

It takes effort—his mouth is dry and his throat is hoarse—but he wets his lips with his tongue and manages to ask, “Why are you here?”

Lebreau’s smile only widens, and he tilts his head as if puzzled. “Surely you already know the answer to that,” he says. “I work for the Dormentaires, remember? Since about the time we met? I thought I’d made that much clear to you…”

He finishes with a careless shrug that Jean barely notices. His head is spinning, and it’s not just from the pain. “You told them about me,” he says breathlessly. It’s the only thing that makes sense. The only reason they would have stormed his home after ten years of ignorance, but only a week after Lebreau came to visit.

The monster smiles at him between the bars.

“I gave you a few days,” he says modestly. “The chance to kill yourself, if you wanted to. But instead, I am given to understand that you wrote another play? You’re _incredible_ , Jean.”

The admiration in his voice sounds almost genuine, sounds like years of honeyed flattery, but it tastes like bile in Jean’s mouth.

“Of course, you know that ending your own life would solve nothing, don’t you? It wouldn’t turn back time or unwrite your plays or unbreak Huey Laforet’s heart or bring Monica Campanella back to life or peel Lotto Valentino out of the Dormentaires’ hands. It would have been meaningless. Whatever purpose you once had has been served, and now the matter of your life or death matters not at all to anyone. Though I admit I did wonder whether you would exceed my expectations and pull it off.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Not quite, I suppose.”

Jean closes his eyes. It should have shut out Lebreau’s smile, but he knows it too well. It looks just as it did ten years ago, only now he is aware of the malice in it. He wonders how he could have failed to notice it before.

“Leave,” he says, and it sounds like he’s begging.

“I can’t yet,” Lebreau answers, lightly apologetic. “I need you to promise me something first, Jean.”

He opens his eyes, practically against his will. If he had been hoping for a change in Lebreau’s expression to accompany the change in his voice, he is immediately disappointed.

“They aren’t done with you yet, you know,” he says conversationally. “They’ll want to know how you knew about Gardi.”

Jean flinches. At first, all he can think is that it means more beatings, more torture. It will be more strategic than the lashes he’s already been subjected to. Will they flay his skin? Break his bones? What pain will they inflict to convince him to—

But then he gives a gasp that turns into a heady laugh. He looks at Lebreau in amazement, suddenly understanding that he _doesn’t have to suffer anymore_. “You think you can make me promise not to tell.”

“I hope so,” Lebreau answers, his smile taking on a rueful air.

“I make no such promise. No, I promise exactly the opposite—as soon as they ask, as soon as they so much as _look_ at me next, I will throw myself on my knees and give them your name!” He nearly shouts it, shocked at the power that has fallen so unexpectedly into his hands, and doesn’t even care when the effort makes his back sting. He feels weightless. “Why would I do otherwise? What can you, what can _anyone_ do to me that you haven’t already done? Even if you have so ingratiated yourself that they disbelieve me and execute me, then I will die, but at least I will have planted a seed of doubt against you!”

Lebreau remains unmoved by Jean’s tirade. When Jean runs out of breath, he only gives that rueful smile again. It’s bashful, almost boyish.

“I thought you might say something like that, which is why I took the liberty of visiting your wife yesterday after your arrest.”

The rapturous light falls from Jean’s face in an instant.

“You—you what?” he forces out through a throat suddenly tight with fear, even though the pounding of his heart tells him that he doesn’t want to know the rest of this.

“You see, I told her I had seen the commotion from afar and apologized for being able to do nothing. She recognized me from my visit last week, so she was very welcoming—she said ‘any friend of Jean’s is a friend of mine’ through her tears. She’s a strong woman, Jean. Though I suppose she would have to be, to tolerate being in hiding with you all these years. Oh, and your son! He seems like such a sweet child. I introduced my Czeslaw to him, and the two warmed up to each other immediately. It’s been so long since he’s had the chance to play big brother—since before we boarded the Advenna Avis, I suppose.”

Jean shakes his head, hardly conscious of the action. He can feel his legs trembling. “They—they have nothing to do with this,” he chokes out. “Leave them alone.”

Lebreau’s smile widens, showing his teeth like a predator.

“You want them to be left alone? After the pain of your arrest? I could never, Jean. Your wife is so concerned about you. Of course I promised I’d tell her anything I found out—how could I not? I am, after all, one of your dearest friends. Still, if suspicion were to fall on me and I were forced to run from the Dormentaires… Can you imagine my fear? I wouldn’t be able to think straight—I don’t know what I’d say to her. In my confusion, I might accidentally suggest that it would be safest for her and the child to come with me.”

Jean’s lips move. He’s mouthing _no, no_ over and over but the word isn’t coming out.

“And then… who knows?” Lebreau pauses there, his expression briefly more abstract; he traces his tongue over his front teeth in thought. Then the smile creeps up his face again slowly, ever-so-slowly, just like the curtain rising on a play. “I’m sure I’d think of something.”

Something in Jean breaks, and he drops like a stone to his knees.

There’s no way to resist, no way out of the hell that Lebreau lured him into. He’s lost there. He knows he can’t stop Lebreau from carrying out his threat; even if he kills himself without accusing Lebreau, even if he bears torture in silence, his family still might be in danger. The only certainty before him is that if he so much as thinks of betraying his former friend to the Dormentaires, then he will be condemning his wife and child to hell.

He can tell, without looking up, that Lebreau is still smiling in his mild way.

“You understand, don’t you, Jean?”

It’s not a rhetorical question. He wants an answer. Jean nods—he has to.

“Oh, good. I’m so glad. I thought you probably would, but some people are less predictable under stress…”

Words that could have been taken as an insult instead fall on deaf ears. There is a question battering about in Jean’s head like a flag in a tempest, and he has to raise his eyes and ask:

“Why?”

Lebreau tilts his head.

“Why turn me in, if—if all it has done is give me this chance, the chance to reveal you—”

The chance isn’t there anymore. He knows that. But it could have been, and it would have been Lebreau who created it just as certainly as it had been he who obliterated it with a few simple words.

Lebreau only smiles more widely. Jean doesn’t think he’s ever seen anyone wear such an honest expression of _joy_ before. And then, without another word, Lebreau Fermet Viralesque turns and leaves Jean’s cell behind him.

 

> I don’t think I will ever be able to forget that smile.
> 
> It lurks in the darkness behind my eyelids, appears in my dreams. I held it in my mind, a single point of focus, as the Dormentaires saw me tortured, and I repeated, over and over and over, that the information I used to write my plays came to me in anonymous letters. They didn’t believe me the first time I said it, of course—who would?—but when I would not say otherwise no matter what they did to me, they must have given up. Somehow, my life was spared. I might have mistaken that for a miracle once, but in the grips of paranoia, I can only imagine that Lebreau had something to do with it, and that somewhere he is smiling over the fact that I’m still dancing at the end of his puppet-strings.
> 
> Even if I’m wrong about that, he’d be delighted to hear that I believe as much.
> 
> The specter of that delight hangs over me, and I see his smile when I sleep, and I curse myself for having ever thought it kind.
> 
>  
> 
> Time has passed. I have healed from most of the injuries I sustained at the hands of the Dormentaires. Even my fingers—which I feared would never recover from being broken—have reshaped themselves well enough that I can once more hold a pen. And so, like a fool, I do.
> 
> Despise me for it, if you wish.
> 
> Despise me for the play that I now revise under the careful watch of Dormentaire soldiers. Certainly, I despise myself for it. I first wrote it, not to hide the secrets of Huey Laforet and Monica Campanella’s escape, but to win some amnesty from the Dormentaires for my family. I placed the completed script under my wife’s pillow just before I tried to end my life, with a note begging her to sell it to support herself and our son once I was gone. But she was not the one to find it. When I was arrested, my home was searched, and it was seized by the Dormentaires.
> 
> But rather than burning it, they now ask me to revise the play.
> 
> As they are greedy for power and money, so they are greedy for renown; they want their invasion of Lotto Valentino painted in a good light. They want it justified. And though the first draft favored them over the Mask Makers—I am not foolish enough to have left my wife a play that did otherwise—they still request revisions. Day after day, I sit at this desk, shaping the script according to their whims and demands. I am permitted to write nothing else.
> 
> And yet, I write this letter in secret.
> 
> I say again: this letter should not exist.
> 
> It _must not_ exist.
> 
> I risk the Dormentaires’ rage by lifting my pen without their permission, and I risk worse—much worse—for my family for daring to record the name of the one who first tempted me down this path to hell.
> 
> I gain _nothing_.
> 
> And yet, I write.
> 
> I said earlier that I must write it. In a sense, that is true, but I speak not of an outward force compelling me to do so, nor of an inward sense of compulsion. Let me be clear on that point: it is no compulsion that drives me. If I chose to, I could lower my pen at this instant and for the rest of my life write only what I am told to.
> 
> Instead, I choose—I choose at every moment—to continue writing.
> 
> I do not know if I can explain myself except to say that I _must_ write. I must write because of my despair; I must write because everything but this despair is lost to me. I must write because I am a writer, and when I am faced with something this absolute, I want to take it in my hands and force it, alive and writhing like a serpent, onto the page so that its sting may be turned towards others by my will. Words arise and arrange themselves in my mind, almost unbidden. And once they are there—once I have caught a glimpse of how I might tame such heartache and pathos— _I must write_.
> 
> It’s hubris. I know this. And I know that this hubris is precisely what drew Lebreau to me—what he fed in order to flatter me—what he fostered in order to manipulate me. When he came to me in tears with the story of his childhood, could he see my fingers trembling with the desire to write? Did he know that my mind was already shaping the misery he pretended into stage directions, lines of dialogue? When did he first realize that I am powerless against my own need to wield such pain for my own glory?
> 
> If I desire so strongly to manipulate, to hurt… am I any better than him?
> 
>  
> 
> If these questions have an answer, I do not wish to hear it.
> 
> And yet, I ask it. I write on the backs and in the margins of the play’s first draft as if making notes. At the end of each day, I hand over the pages of the draft I am finished with and see them cast into the flames: my work destroyed, and my safety guaranteed for one more day. If a single page—if even a single sentence—were to escape this fate, I would be bringing damnation down upon myself and my innocent family. And yet, I write.
> 
>  
> 
> To an unseen reader—to a reader who cannot, _must_ not exist—if you are reading this, I am not grateful to you.
> 
> I do not despise you.
> 
> I have no charge for you.
> 
> I do not care who you are at all.
> 
> I only hope that I have laid a hand on your heart and made you feel, if only for a moment, the fear and despair that I drown in every day.
> 
> If I have achieved that, then as a poet and as a playwright, I am satisfied.


End file.
